by Simmons Bill
In general, the NBA was veering in a healthier direction. Walter Kennedy replaced Podoloff as the league’s second (and, everyone hoped, more competent) commish.24 The Celtics became the first to routinely play five blacks at the same time as opponents emulated their aggressive style—chasing the ball defensively, keeping a center underneath to protect the rim, and using the other defenders to swarm and double-team. With the degree of difficulty rising on the offensive end, the athleticism of certain players started to flourish. You know something was happening since attendance rose to nearly 2.5 million and ABC forked over $4 million for a five-year rights deal despite a dearth of white stars.
The network handed its package to Roone Arledge, an innovative young executive who eventually helped revolutionize television with his work on Monday Night Football, Wide World of Sports, the Olympics, college football, and even Nightline (the first show of its kind). 25 According to Halberstam, “What ABC has to prove to a disbelieving national public, [Arledge] believed, was that this was not simply a bunch of tall awkward goons throwing a ball through a hoop, but a game of grace and power played at a fever of intensity. He was artist enough to understand and catch the artistry of the game. He used replays endlessly to show the ballet, and to catch the intensity of the matchups … he intended to exploit as best he could the traditional rivalries, for that was one of the best things the league had going for it, genuine rivalries in which the players themselves participated. Those rivalries, Boston-Philly, New York-Baltimore, needed no ballyhoo; the athletes themselves were self-evidently proud and they liked nothing better than to beat their opponents, particularly on national television. They were, in those days, obviously motivated more by pride than money, and the cameras readily caught their pride.” For the first time, the NBA was in the right hands with a TV network. 26
1964–65: THE BIG TRADE
When the struggling Warriors sent Wilt (and his gigantic contract) back to Philly for Connie Dierking, Lee Shaffer, $150,000, Baltic Avenue, two railroads, and three immunities, the trade rejuvenated Philly and San Francisco as NBA cities—both would make the Finals within the next three years—and was covered like an actual news event. In fact, “Chamberlain Traded!” may have been the NBA’s first unorchestrated mainstream moment. Put it this way: Walter Cronkite wasn’t mentioning the NBA on the CBS Evening News unless it was something like “Celtics legend Bob Cousy retired today.” I’ve always called this the Mom Test. My mother was never a sports fan, so if she ever said something like, “Hey, how ’bout that Mike Tyson, can you believe he bit that guy’s ear off?” then you knew it was a huge sports moment because the people who weren’t sports fans were paying attention. Anyway, Wilt getting traded definitely passed the Mom Test. Also, I think Wilt slept with the Mom Test.
(One other biggie that year: with Tommy Heinsohn retiring after the season, Oscar Robertson replaced him as the head of the players union. I just love the fact that we live in a world where Tommy once led a labor movement. Elgin, I gotta tell ya, I absolutely love your idea for a dental plan! Bing, bang, boom! That’s a Tommy Point for you, Mr. B!)
1965–66: RED’S LAST STAND
I always loved Red Auerbach for announcing his retirement before the ’66 season started, hoping to motivate his players and drum up national interest in an “Okay, here’s your last chance to beat me!” season. Like always, he succeeded: Boston defeated the Lakers for an eighth straight title in Red’s much-hyped farewell, 27 given an extra jolt after Game 1 of the Finals when Auerbach announced that Russell would replace him as the first black coach in professional sports history. 28
Like everything Red did, the move worked on both fronts: Boston rallied to win the ’66 title, and Russell turned out to be the perfect coach for Russell (although not right away).
Red’s retirement marked the departure of old-school coaches who didn’t need assistants, bitched out officials like they were meter maids, punched out opposing owners and hostile fans, never used clipboards to diagram plays and manned the sidelines holding only a rolled-up program. He controlled every single aspect of Boston’s franchise, coaching the team by himself, signing free agents, trading and waiving players, making draft picks, scouting college players, driving the team bus on road trips, handling the team’s business affairs and travel plans, performing illegal abortions on his players’ mistresses and everything else.29 That’s just the way the league worked from 1946 to 1966. Red was also something of a showman, putting on foot-stomping shows when things didn’t go Boston’s way, antagonizing referees and opponents, and lighting victory cigars before games had ended. Until Wilt usurped his title, Red served as the league’s premier supervillain, the guy everyone loved to hate even as they were admitting he made the league more fun.
With players finally earning real money and achieving fame on a mainstream level, the player-coach dynamic was shifting—it was becoming more difficult to scream at players Lombardi-style or make them run wind sprints until they keeled over, that’s for sure—and salary hikes made it harder to keep great teams together. 30 Auerbach lowballed his players by convincing them they’d make the money back in the playoffs; he knew that if they bought into that bullshit, then he’d never have to worry about motivating them. Once salaries started climbing past a certain point, you couldn’t play the playoff-money card. Like always, Auerbach read the league’s tea leaves perfectly and left at the perfect time. From the moment Biasone created the shot clock, Red determined where the sport was heading, embraced the influx of black players and capably handled the enigmatic Russell, a ferocious competitor, lazy practice player and overly sensitive soul who was affected by everything he couldn’t control: the plight of African American athletes, his lack of acceptance in Boston, the lack of a labor agreement, Wilt’s reported salary, even the civil rights movement and his place in it. Other than Muhammad Ali, Russell was the single most important athlete of the sixties and it’s impossible to imagine him playing for anyone else, as evidenced by the fact that Red never gave us the chance. They were a perfect match, a little Jewish guy from Brooklyn and a tall black guy from Louisiana bringing out the best in each other, dominating the league for a solid decade and changing the way basketball was played. Will a professional basketball coach ever matter that much again? No. No way.
1966–67: THE SECOND RIVAL
The American Basketball Association formed in February of 1967 and announced plans for its first season in October. The intentions of the league’s founders were unclear: did they want to compete with the NBA or force a potentially lucrative merger? Within a few months, they named George Mikan commissioner, announced franchises for eleven cities (New York, 31 Pittsburgh, Indy, Minny, Oakland, Anaheim, Dallas, New Orleans, Houston and Denver) and promised to (a) sign current NBA players and incoming rookies (happened); (b) get themselves a TV contract (didn’t happen), (c) play with a multicolored ball and a three-point line (happened), and (d) encourage their players to grow gravity-defying afros, dunk as much as possible and try all kinds of drugs (happened). 32 Instead of accepting that a rival was inevitable, NBA owners panicked and moved up their expansion plans, adding five more teams (Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Milwaukee and Phoenix) over the next three years and then three more (Portland, Cleveland and Buffalo) for the 1970–71 season. As an ABC executive joked in Breaks, when they put in a clause in the 1965 TV
contract allowing ABC to cancel if any NBA team folded, they should have gone the other way and placed a limit on the number of expansion teams. After all, nothing ruins a sports league faster than overexpansion, diluted teams and the death of rivalries, right? 33 Throw in competition for players, a potential antitrust lawsuit and the new Players Association potentially challenging the reserve clause, and suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy for the National Basketball Association. Although nobody knew it yet.
1967–71: THE BROKEN MIRROR
That would be Spencer Haywood. He was bad luck. For everyone. Sure, you make your own bad luck to some degree, and in
this case the NBA allowed salaries to escalate too rapidly during the latter part of the sixties. In 1966, Knicks rookie Cazzie Russell (the number one overall pick) signed a three-year, $250,000 contract, pushing the Association into the “okay, guys, you don’t have to have a second job during the summers anymore” era. The following year, college star Elvin Hayes passed up ABA money (and the chance to play for Houston) for a $350,000 deal with the Rockets. Jimmy Walker (Jalen Rose’s dad) parlayed the ABA’s interest into a lucrative
$250,000 package with Detroit, becoming the first of dozens of talented young NBA players who didn’t reach their potential partly because somebody paid them too much too soon. Warriors star Rick Barry jumped leagues, signed with Oakland and became the first professional athlete to dispute the reserve clause in contracts (a clause that allowed teams to keep a player’s rights for one year after his contract ended). The legal challenge went poorly and Barry spent the season as Oakland’s TV announcer. As far as career moves go, this ranked right up there with David Caruso ditching NYPD Blue and Andy Richter leaving Conan O’Brien’s show. On the bright side, somebody had to challenge the reserve clause, right? 34
Here’s the irony: Even as money was poisoning professional basketball for the first time, the NBA couldn’t have been in better shape as a whole. During the 1968–69 season, the Lakers opened up the league’s first state-of-the-art arena (the 17,000-seat L.A. Forum), attendance topped 4.4
million, ratings rose from 6.0 (1965) to 8.9 in 1969, and ABC even televised a few prime-time playoff games (including Game 7 of the 1969 Finals during May sweeps). But everyone was getting greedy: players, owners, agents, you name it. And you know how that plays out.
Enter the Broken Mirror. Haywood started his professional career when Lew Alcindor did, so we can blame his bad karma for swaying the NBA’s number one pick that year: Phoenix would have been a better market for Big Lew, but Milwaukee won the coin toss and the Suns took Neil Walk second.35 Haywood became the first nonsenior to play professionally, signing with the ABA’s Denver Rockets as a “hardship” case and unwittingly giving the ABA an enormous advantage: Now the ABA had first crack at nonseniors and high schoolers because the NBA stuck by its antiquated four-year draft eligibility rule. So you could blame Haywood for the eventual influx of underclassmen and teenagers who nearly submarined the NBA in the 1990s, as well as the NBA preventing more dangerous Haywood signings by arranging a merger in May 1971. The NBA accepted ten ABA teams (everyone but Virginia). In return, the ABA dropped its antitrust suit, each ABA team agreed to pay $1.25 million over ten years, and ABA teams were deprived of TV
money until 1973. The NBA Players Association quickly sued to block it, arguing that the merger created a monopoly and preserved the unconstitutional reserve clause. The ensuing legal dispute (nicknamed the Oscar Robertson suit) would drag on for another five miserable years. In retrospect, it’s hard to fathom how the NBA could have handled twenty-eight teams in 1972, so the timing of that lawsuit looks like divine intervention. Regardless, I blame the Broken Mirror (Haywood) for putting it in motion.
After winning three ABA awards as a rookie (MVP, Rookie of the Year and All-Star MVP),36
Haywood left tread marks fleeing for the 1970–71 Sonics after realizing his quote-unquote three-year, $450,000 Denver contract only paid him $50,000 per year, then another $15,000
annually for twenty years starting when he turned forty. He had been victimized by a brilliant ABA trick called the Dolgoff plan, in which they offered contracts with deceivingly high dollar figures but backloaded most of the deals. How did they pull off such chicanery? According to Loose Balls, by routinely bribing agents to talk their clients into those deals. 37 (The bigger problem arose when NBA stars used those artificially high numbers to negotiate legitimately high deals, leading to the salary explosion that transformed the NBA as we knew it. And not in a good way. Well, unless you enjoy watching wealthy, coked-out, passionless basketball. Then you were pumped.) Haywood signed with Seattle and successfully contested the NBA’s hardship rule, leading to a slew of prospects filing early and claiming financial “hardship” even though nearly all of them were getting paid under the table in college. 38
Haywood symbolized an increasingly erratic sport: wealthy and empowered just a little too soon, looking out for himself only, thriving during an era with too many teams and younger stars being given too much money and responsibility waaaaaaaaay too soon. That’s how the seventies became the Too Many, Too Much, Too Soon era. The Broken Mirror became its defining figure, peaking too early, earning a ton of money and spending it just as fast, switching teams every few years (always after letting the previous one down), helping to destroy the post-Bradley Knicks, souring Sonics coach/GM Bill Russell on professional basketball, marrying a celebrity (the model Iman), developing a massive cocaine problem and even being involved in the single greatest known coke story in NBA history (we’ll get there). It can’t be a coincidence that Spencer Haywood retired after the 1982–83 season and the league immediately took off. It just can’t.
1971–72: THE STREAK
Why hasn’t anyone made a documentary about the ’72 Lakers? You had the league’s most beloved star and tragic figure, Jerry West, winning his first title on a 69-win team. You had Elgin retiring two weeks into the season and becoming the first superstar to retire without winning a ring,39
paving the way for Dan Marino, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and every other star who took heat for falling short. You had Wilt playing the way we always wanted him to play. You had an increasing number of Hollywood celebs hitting home games at the “hip” L.A. Forum, a trend that Doris Day had pioneered in the early sixties. Best of all, you had L.A.’s 33-game winning streak, which happened in a diluted league but remains remarkable when you remember the previous record was 20 (the ’71 Bucks). 40 I’ll save my thoughts on the ’72 Lakers for the “Keyzer Söze”
chapter, but let’s rank that streak against the unbreakable records in NBA history. Here’s my top ten:
1. Wilt’s 50 per game. Perfect storm of the right era, the right guy, the right rules and the right ball hog. We might not see 40 a game again, much less 50.
2. Wilt’s 55-rebound game. Since nobody has come within 20 boards of this mark in the past two decades, and since it’s difficult for an entire team to snare 55 rebounds these days, I’m declaring this one safe. The guy who came within 20? (Wait for it … wait for it …) Charles Oakley in 1988.
3. Russell’s eleven rings. Too many teams, too much movement, too tough to keep a great team together for more than a few years. I just can’t imagine someone getting twelve. Even if someone had a Horry-like career as a role player and played contender roulette for fifteen years, landing in the right situation over and over again, could they get twelve? Nobody had better timing/luck than Horry and he only has seven. Could someone be 55 percent luckier than Big Shot? I don’t see it.
4. L.A.’s 33-game win streak. Like Bob Beamon’s long jump in Mexico, only if he jumped 39 feet instead of 29 feet. Here’s how it happened: you had a veteran, experienced, talented nucleus that had been together for years dismantling a diluted league that, except for Milwaukee and Baltimore, had seen too much player movement because of expansion and the ABA. In a three-season span from 1969 to 1972, we witnessed four of the thirteen longest streaks ever: 33 games, 20 games, 18 games and 16 games (the ’71 Bucks again). Coincidence? No way. I have a goofy theory on the 33-gamer: Bill Sharman took over the Lakers that year and may have been the first “real” NBA coach ever. Back then, NBA game days consisted of players showing up an hour before the game, farting around, then getting advice from coaches like “Keep Willis off the boards” and “Don’t let Monroe kill us” while everyone smoked Marlboro Reds. Sharman was a stickler for detail, conditioning and repetition—things today’s generation takes for granted but everyone ignored in the fifties and sixties—forcing his players to stretch every day, pushing them to eat healthy and quit smoking, scheduling game-day shoot-ar
ounds so players could get accustomed to rims and shooting backgrounds at different arenas, requiring them to watch game films and basically doing everything that modern coaches do. For a veteran team like the Lakers, those little things pushed them to another level. He also handled Chamberlain better than any other coach, becoming the first to convince Wilt to buy into Russell’s rebounding/shot-blocking routine, even pulling a Jedi mind trick by soliciting Wilt’s opinions and ideas all season so Wilt felt part of everything that was happening. 41 The Dipper sacrificed a ton of shots but fully embraced the whole unselfishness/teamwork thing, 42 and over everything else, that’s what made his team so great. So yeah, on paper, it doesn’t make sense that the ’72 Lakers were better than the ’69 Lakers … but when you factor in a diluted league, Sharman’s influence and Wilt’s reinvention, it makes sense.
5. George McGinnis’ 422 turnovers. Disclaimer: This happened in the ABA. McGinnis holds the first (422), second (401), and third (398) all-time turnover spots, making him the Chamberlain of turnovers. 43 The NBA didn’t start keeping track of turnovers until the ’78
season, robbing us of two landmark George years before he notched 312 in 1978 and a whopping 346 in 1979. Who made more turnovers over the years, George McGinnis or Rachael Ray? Will we ever see someone else average more than five turnovers a game without getting benched or killed by his own fans? If I’d had my column back in the mid-seventies, I would have been ragging on George constantly: between his ball-stopping habits, ugly one-handed jumper, moody attitude and disinterest in defense, George took more off the table than any “superstar” ever. You can’t believe how much McGinnis secretly sucked until you watch his stink bomb in the ’77 Finals. I know he peaked two or three years earlier (most famously with a 52-point, 37-rebound game in 1974) and had a miserable series, but still, you can’t tell me someone that sloppy and simple to defend belonged on a championship team. 44 Regardless, I can’t imagine anyone breaking George’s hallowed 422 or averaging a quadruple nickel like he did in ’75 (29.9 points, 9.2